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YOUNG VIOLINIST IN OLD TRADITION, WITH VARIATIONS

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Shlomo Mintz, the 24-year-old violinist appearing at the Mostly Mozart Festival tonight and tomorrow night, is both a typical and an atypical young virtuoso.

Not everyone on our major concert stages today was born in the Soviet Union, raised in Israel and trained in New York. But the combination of a Slavic heritage, Israeli kinship and Juilliard School polishing is indeed common to others of Mr. Mintz's generation. And the fact that Mr. Mintz owes his New York residence for the last eight years to Isaac Stern's fatherly patronage is not unusual either. Mr. Mintz's status as a stern protege helps explain his present success, with 120 concerts a year with some of the world's best ochestras, festival appearances and a recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon.

What makes him atypical, however, is that he achieved his success without participation in any of the well-known international competitions. Word of Mouth Counts

''The only competition I ever entered was at Juilliard, and I lost,'' Mr. Mintz recalled the other day.''Now I'm playing 120 concerts a year. I respect the judges, but competitions are a very unfruitful way of judging art. What is important is word of mouth, among your colleagues and in the audience.''

An only child, Mr. Mintz came to Israel with his parents at the age of 2 and began studying the violin a year later. From the age of 6, his teacher was Ilona Feher, who brought him to Mr. Stern's attention. Mr. Stern, in turn, recommended that he continue his studies at Juilliard with Dorothy Delay, the teacher of so many leading violinists.

From 16 to 18, Mr. Mintz concentrated on his studies, but since then his career has seen steady growth. Last year, he spent a total of only two weeks in the modest apartment he maintains across the street from Juilliard.

Although he prefers to think of music as ''global'' and to resist facile stylistic categorizations, Mr. Mintz considers his own style a synthesis of the older, mostly Russian Romanticism of Kreisler (his boyhood idol), Milstein, Elman and Heifetz with the ''form, line and structure'' of his own generation. Producing Results on Demand

''Modern violinists have to be more efficient, more practical,'' he adds. One reason is their hectic schedules, making plane connections and jetting about the world. Another is the curtailment of rehearsal time in today's high-pressure music world, which means that soloists have to know their business and achieve presentable artistic results on demand.

Mr. Mintz regrets what he perceives as a decline in the care that once defined music-making. ''Kreisler used to get several days to work on a concerto with an orchestra,'' he says. ''This summer I had 20 minutes with the Tchaikovsky concerto at Ravinia, and that's not unusual.''

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So far, Mr. Mintz's repertory has been weighted toward the Romantic period, and especially toward the big, 19th-century warhorse concertos that most orchestras ask him to play. This weekend, however, he will be playing the Mozart Concerto in G (K. 216) under Philippe Entremont's direction; the rest of the all-Mozart program consists of the overture and ballet music to ''Idomeneo'' and the Piano Concerto No. 9 in E flat (K. 271), with Mr. Entremont as soloist. In addition, Mr. Mintz and his regular accompanist, Pavel Ostrovsky, will offer a Mozart sonata and a Schubert sonatina in the preconcert recital.

Mr. Mintz's seeming Romantic predilections might suggest he was an awkward Mozartian, ill at ease with the period authenticity that is musically fashionable right now. But such fashions haven't yet affected the Mostly Mozart Festival in general to any considerable degree, or most young virtuosos of Mr. Mintz's mainstream persuasion. A Degree of Simplicity

In discussing 18th-century style, Mr. Mintz speaks gingerly of ''a certain element of sterility, or better 'simplicity,' '' that he favors for some Mozart works - including the violin concertos, all composed in 1775 and therefore fairly youthful entries in the Mozart canon. But for the later works, he says, ''you can't be sterile, simple or evenhanded.''

Aside from Mozart, Mr. Mintz is in the process of extending his scope , especially in the recital repertory that takes up 40 percent of his touring schedule. His next recordings will be the two Prokofiev concertos with Claudio Abbado and the Chicago Symphony and an album of solo Bach. He is learning the Berg concerto and the Faure Sonata in E minor and is looking into Janacek, Saint-Saens, Bloch and Bartok.

In his spare time, Mr. Mintz has been known to listen to jazz and even a top-40 pop station like WNBC in the morning. Does he worry that his own repertory is becoming too custodial, cut off from the life of his time in a way that actual Romantic composer-virtuosos like Paganini and Liszt never were?

''I personally feel that Bach and all great composers are still our contemporaries,'' Mr. Mintz replies. ''Great composers don't think for the moment, but hundreds of year in advance; they foresee the future. Stravinsky once said that Beethoven in his late quartets was the most contemporary musician he knew.''

The Mostly Mozart program with Mr. Mintz tonight and tomorrow at Avery Fisher Hall begins at 8 P.M., with a half-hour preconcert recital at 7 P.M. included in the price of a ticket. Seats cost $9.50 and $7.50, and are available at the Avery Fisher Hall box office (874-2424).

A version of this article appears in print on July 30, 1982, on Page C00020 of the National edition with the headline: YOUNG VIOLINIST IN OLD TRADITION, WITH VARIATIONS. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe